Birdy_server

The server part of Birdy

Installation steps

• Create a virtualenv and activate it
• pip install -r requirements.txt in it
• Install a postgresql server
• Create a postgresql 'birdy_admin' user, and give him the rights on 'postgres' DB
• Create 2 environment variables: BIRDY_SETTINGS which should point to your birdy.cfg, and BIRDY which should point to the folder of the server
• Run "./utils/db_utils.py --action init" in the birdy_server folder to initialize the DB
• Launch birdy_server.py (chmod +x and ./birdy_server.py)
• Enjoy!

Instructions to use in production:

The previous instructions are sufficient for a development environment. To run the application in production though, setting up a Gunicorn server and an NginX reverse proxy is recommended. The easiest way to do so is to install Gunicorn, NginX, and then to follow the part of this DigitalOcean documentation relative to the NginX configuration. The only requirement is to setup the proxy pass like this:

    location / {
        proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:8000/;
    }

Once it's done, run:

# echo "alias brdy='cd /home/birdy/birdy_server && source venv/bin/activate && gunicorn -w 3 --log-file /var/log/gunicorn/error.log --access-logfile /var/log/gunicorn/access.log -b localhost:8000 birdy_server:app &'" >> ~/.bashrc && mkdir -p /var/log/gunicorn && touch /var/log/gunicorn/access.log && touch /var/log/gunicorn/error.log

This will setup an alias for your root user to start 3 Gunicorn workers serving the application on port 8000, which is queried by NginX thanks to the proxy_pass mentionned above.

Now typing brdy as root will start the application, and killall gunicorn will stop it.

Settings

birdy.cfg should be organized this way:

SECRET_KEY = 'yourKey'

DATABASE = 'postgres'

USER = 'your_db_user'

PASSWORD = 'password'

Debugging

• If the SQL stuff fail, maybe your PostgreSQL installation isn't configured to accept password login for local user. Consider switching the method in pg_hba.conf for local connection to md5 or fiddling with psycopg2.